" ... Mozart owes the win to a boxed set of his music that was released Oct. 28 in celebration of the 225th anniversary of his death and went on to sell 1.25 million CDs in just five weeks. (Drake’s Views took twice that time to edge past 1 million sales, by comparison.) The compilation “is the fruit of years of scholarship, planning, and curation,” according to Universal Music Group. ...

"It’s the stuff of stories and musical legend: the buried violin, dug up and brought to sing anew. In the film “The Red Violin,” the titular instrument is at one point interred with a gifted young player, then unearthed by grave-robbing gypsies who play it for a couple of generations.

But the violinist Chee-Yun didn’t expect to have one in real life. ...

Ignacio Prego is a leading member of the rising generation of Spanish early music specialists, which numbers existing Glossa recording artists such as Fahmi Alqhai and Josetxu Obregón. Prego has already been securing for himself a very busy concert schedule across Europe, the US and Asia, and he is frequently to be heard performing harpsichord concertos with ensembles such as the Portland Baroque Orchestra or The English Concert, collaborating with eminent musicians such as Monica Huggett and Nicholas McGegan, or giving solo harpsichord recitals, where he is able to demonstrate his special preference for the works of JS Bach. ...

"Over the past five years crowdfunding has grown into a vital source of finance for community groups, artists and creatives. In the US, Kickstarter famously helped raise more funds for the arts than the National Endowment for the Arts. In the UK crowdfunding for the arts has also grown rapidly, with models such as rewards-based crowdfunding – the model most popular with artists and creatives – facilitating £42m worth of donations in 2015, a growth of more than 60% from £26m in 2014. ...

"Vinyl is booming in Toronto. Record shops have popped up all over the city to serve a new generation of record buyers as the format becomes popular again, but fans of classical music might be feeling a little left out of the resurgence. The new shops carry everything from folk to electronica to hip hop, but in many of them, the classical “section” amounts to a single milk crate on the floor near the back. ...

"The Brill Reformation Year E-Book Collection offers unique access to 125 carefully selected e-books, covering all aspects of the Reformation, its genesis, its context, its impact, and its aftermath. The books were published between 2006 and 2017. The collection is aimed at students and scholars in the fields of:

"... The list of heavy-drinking composers is worthy of Monty Python’s ‘Philosophers’ Song’. It includes Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius. There are no reports of Bach getting drunk — but during a fortnight’s trip to Halle in 1713 his beer bill came to ...

"Our 2017 Choral Pilgrimage tour contrasts the music of the "Prince of polyphony" Giovanni Pierluigi de Palestrina with the great 20th-century melodist Francis Poulenc." ...

Poulenc’s choral music was all written after 1936, when the tragic death of a close friend led to a religious epiphany. Its seriousness and intensity contrast with his more frivolous secular style, but these works make perfect companion pieces for the pure counterpoint of the great Renaissance master, Palestrina. ...

(For those of you doing academic research or those in need of translation of text, help is on the way from Google in the form of its Google Translation services and its artificial intelligence technology -- Editor)

"Google Translate is getting brainier. The online translation tool recently started using a neural network to translate between some of its most popular languages – and the system is now so clever it can do this for language pairs on which it has not been explicitly trained. To do this, it seems to have created its own artificial language. ...

"This box set presents the complete narrative works (historiae) of Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) in the acclaimed new recordings featuring Ars Nova Copenhagen conducted by Paul Hillier. The engaging account of the six stories of Christmas, Passion and Resurrection in Schütz’ sublime Baroque settings is presented along with authoritative notes and the conductor’s own commentaries. ...

"The young period band Höör Barock, based in the south of Sweden, has chosen a colourful programme for its début disc. With recorder virtuoso Dan Laurin at the helm, the twelve musicians steer a course through Telemann’s celebrated Wassermusik (also known as Hamburger Ebb’ und Fluth) with its sea gods and goddesses dancing bourrées and gavottes before a rowdy crowd of seamen closes the suite with an energetic Canarie. ...

(Although performed on modern instruments, the Czech composer is noteworthy. -- Editor)

"Jakub Jan Ryba is wrongly regarded as a composer of only one piece: the czech christmas Mass, without which today it is impossible to imagine czech christmas. His legacy as a composer, however, is much more diverse than anyone could think. It reflects the richness of Ryba’s multifaceted talent, stemming in part from his conscious conceptual thinking but at the same time wholly imbued with spiritual charge with which Ryba, a deeply religious man, endowed all his works. ...

"Seventeen-year-old Lucie Horsch is one of the most remarkable musical talents of her generation, and already in great demand as a solo recorder player both in her native Netherlands and internationally. ...

"Adriano in Siria, just like the remaining drammi per musica of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, was in oblivion for two and a half centuries. In his time, the composer was a prominent figure on the musical scene of Naples. Today, when his work has been retrieved, the contemporary audience may find out that this neglect was utterly unjustified and admire Pergolesi’s artistry in composing. ...

News from the "Irish Times Ticket Awards" that the Irish Baroque Orchestra (IBO) CD "Concerti Bizarri" and Gli Incognito CD "Teatro Alla Moda" are on their Ticket Awards site as nominees.

About the Irish Times Ticket Awards:

"We’ve asked our critics for their film and music highlights from the past 12 months, which are listed on these pages – but it’s your opinion that we are more interested in. So after you’ve read through these critical takes, let us know who you think were the culture kings of 2016 – and be in with a chance of winning one of our prizes ...

" ... This priceless instrument was made in 1720 by the inventor of the piano, Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731). The video features pianist Dongsok Shin performing one of the first pieces ever written for the piano — a Sonata composed in 1732 from the 12 Sonate da cimbalo di piano e forte detto volgarmente di martelletti, Op. 1, by Lodovico Giustini (1685-1743). ...

An interesting in-depth article on the evolution of search engines and what to expect in the near future. How the compilation of historical facts may be presented/offered by future search engines.

"... engineers are building computer models of neural networks, machines that mimic the elegance and complexity of human thought. But there are still many challenges ahead. Sourcing is a big one. Even a database built from tens of millions of well-vetted books and articles isn’t comprehensive. And there’s still the question of how the results from these new search engines ought to appear to the person searching. A simple graph that shows a connect-the-dots web of related resources and ideas is one way. A more sophisticated map-like interface is another—“like Google Maps,” Gramatic offers—but you’d still lose scale and context as you zoom in and out. ...

For those of you who have online access to the Oxford Journals "English Historical Review", the October 2016 issue is now available online. For others who do not have access, you may want to enquire about possible access with your library. Access to the journals are available through

"Join San Francisco Renaissance Voices (Katherine McKee, music director) for our annual holiday gift to our audiences, this traditional Festival of Lessons & Carols modeled after the event first performed at King's College Cambridge (England) in 1918 and performed every year there, and around the world, since. We again honor a tradition of the festival and will debut a commissioned carol by Bay Area composer Angela Kraft Cross, using text by Bay Area poet Elisabeth Eliassen. ...

"International collaboration has always been the name of the game here at LFBM, and we’re delighted that in these increasingly tricky times we’re still able to keep visits to London by top artists from abroad as one of the main threads of our programming. If you’re a regular e-news reader, you’ll already know about ...

"Bach Collegium San Diego, the city’s premier early music performance ensemble, is searching for a new executive director, following the announcement that its first ever part-time executive director, Abigail McKee, will be leaving to become executive director of the prestigious Portland Baroque Orchestra. McKee will remain at the helm of Bach Collegium San Diego through their performances of Handel's Messiah on December 17–19. ...

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